writeonce/docs/00-status.md

Status board — what is done, what is next

The single place to learn where this project stands. Organised in six buckets: stories (the narrative arc), in progress, done, pending, discarded, learnings. The buckets are sections of this board, not folders — a doc stays where it was authored when its work lands; only its banner and this board change. Every plan and phase doc opens with a > **Status:** banner linking back here; normative contracts (plan/oop-vm/), exploration studies, reference docs and the discarded/learnings registers carry none by design.

Update this board in the same change that finishes work — move the item to done with what actually landed, set the next in-progress item, and record any rejection in discarded.md with its reason.

Statuses: ✅ done · 🔄 in progress · ⬜ pending · ⏸ hold

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▶ NEXT PLAN

Make log-watcher executable — nothing else. The compile-and-run half of the language track is met (2026-08-14): the sample compiles with zero diagnostics, woc build produces a 106 KB standalone binary, and all three modes work — watch alerts on a live file, run schedules a cron.d entry, mcp answers JSON-RPC with all four tools returning isError:false. just log-watcher gates it: 6 checks, 0 failures.

What is left is the difference between "it runs" and "you can leave it running", and every item below came from a measurement on the sample itself:

1. The ownership pass does not know what the stdlib returns — done 2026-08-14. The root cause was deeper than the table: Text was classified Copy, so no Text local was ever dropped. Text is now an owned heap value that is copied at every ownership boundary (container, field, return, binding, loop cursor), the ownership pass reads the stdlib, builtin and static tables, and fs.read_all/net.read no longer mis-size a short read's buffer. Measured: run 1 051 040 B → 2 112 B, watch 128 B → 64 B; what remains is items 2 and 3 below, by stack.
2. A projected temporary is never dropped — done 2026-08-14. The projection was one of six shapes with no owner: a call result compared against nil, an argument the callee only borrows, a container read's copy, a loop's iterable, a projected record, and any of those escaped by a return from inside the statement that built them. Measured: run 2 112 B → 64 B and flat from 8 s to 20 s, the full MCP mix 21 312 B / 63 → 64 B / 1, every handler flat from 2 to 6 requests. The 64 bytes left are item 3, on every path.
3. The runtime leaks its own argv container — done 2026-08-14. The entry only borrows its arguments, so main.c releases the container it built, after the entry returns and after a trap alike. All three modes now report ZERO leaks under ASan — watch, run, and the full MCP mix — which is the clean baseline item 6's soak needs to read against.
4. A stopping program does not stop — done 2026-08-14. A blocking call that parks (net.accept, socket read/write, time.sleep, a child wait) now ends the program when it is interrupted with the stop flag set, instead of restarting the syscall. A stop is not a trap: try cannot swallow it, and the stack unwinds through the same drop machinery, so the exit is clean and leak-free in every mode. It also uncovered a real double-free: an assignment of a Text place was a move, not a copy, so api_key = j.mcp.apiKey aliased the record — let copied, assignment now does too. just log-watcher is 7 checks; the seventh is the stop.
5. The MCP server never closes an accepted connection — done 2026-08-15. net.close on every path out of a serve iteration (and the listener on stop). Measured: 4 → 4 descriptors across 200 requests, was one leaked per request.
6. Nothing soaks — done 2026-08-15. LW_SOAK=<seconds> drives all three modes under load and fails on resident growth past 256 KiB or any descriptor growth. The soak immediately caught what every seconds-long check missed: ~1.6 MiB/min of in-arena leaks the ASan report cannot see (the arena is one allocation to LeakSanitizer). Five bugs fell out: json decode's worst-case string sizing (free lists poisoned by relabeled lengths), != never dropping fresh operands, Int interpolation segments mistaken for borrows, json.encode(Ctor{...})'s unowned argument, and discarded statement results (pop(lines);). After: release soak 30 s per mode — watch 0, run 0, mcp +20 KiB, descriptors flat; ASan build flat at 14 600 KiB across 601 686 requests in 90 s once past its ~1200-request quarantine warm-up.

Plan: plan/compiler/2026-08-14-logwatcher-executable.md · Story slice: docs/stories/language-runtime-database/07-logwatcher-proof.md

Deferred by name, with the measurement that says so:

• Iteration 5's strictness half — ?T forced handling landed 2026-08-18 (WO-E211/212/213 + local narrowing; the samples were updated to the bind-then-narrow idiom and stay green), reject rows landed 2026-08-18 (WO-E105 doctrine diagnostics — super.f() used to compile clean). Still open: pub(read) write enforcement, using, #if. Plan 8 stays open.
• Everything @gc: iteration 7b, set's @gc retention gap, iteration 4's gc/held-cycle leak. The sample declares no @gc class — 35 classes, none with the gc flag, 0 RC_INC/RC_DEC against 78 DROPs — so none of it can affect this workload.
• Iterations 8–12 (shard-actor runtime, database engine, @table/query, HTTP layer, fibers, blue-green): unchanged, and unblocked by this plan.

The project is the language track: iterations 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7, ending at compile and run log-watcher, then the database engine (9/9b) and beyond. (The prior Rust wo runtime was removed from the repo 2026-08-18 — see discarded.md.)

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Stories

docs/stories/language-runtime-database/ — one language, one runtime, one database, one binary. Twelve iterations, each an unsplittable slice with Given/When/Then acceptance and a pointer to the plan that sequences its tasks. Read one, approve, then the next starts.

#	Iteration	State
1	Principles doc	✅
2	VM core (wovm)	✅
3	Compiler front (woc)	✅ (known gaps below)
4	Single binary end-to-end	✅ (known gaps below)
5	Language surface	🔄 grammar done; ?T forced handling ✅ + reject rows ✅ + WO-E205 ✅ (2026-08-18); pub(read)/using/#if still ⏸
6	Program mode + stdlib	✅ (the surface log-watcher uses)
7	log-watcher proof	🔄 runs; executable in progress
7b	Inferred GC + mark-sweep	✅ landed 2026-08-18 — @gc gone (WO-E104), GC-ness inferred, RC replaced by incremental mark-sweep, .wob v4; supersedes iteration 2's RC memory model
8	Shard-actor runtime	⬜
9	Database engine	🔄 engine complete (storage/WAL/indexes/insert-update-delete); reads land with 9b
9b	@table, relations, query	🔄 query surface + relations + FK done (branch query-surface); group-by parked
9c	Cross-program tables	🔄 channel done (branch ipc-attach); manifest+binding pending
9d	Keypair attach auth	🔄 crypto+handshake done (branch keypair-auth); manifest pending
9e	Durability, throughput, scale	⬜ needs a spec first
9f	io_uring group-commit	⬜ after 8 + 9e
9g	Query grammar corpus	⬜ needs a spec first
10	HTTP service layer	⬜	Hold
11	Fibers	⬜	Hold
12	Blue-green deploy	⬜	Hold
13	Compile-time metaprogramming	⬜ needs a spec first
14	skillhost host workload	⬜ gaps recorded (branch query-grammar found skillhost needs no new query grammar); each gap a candidate iteration

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In progress

Track	Item	Where
Language	Iteration 7 — make log-watcher executable (leaks, stop signal, fd lifetime, soak)	executable plan

Off-critical-path work is parked by explicit scope directive (2026-08-08).

Landed 2026-08-14 — the compile-and-run milestone

One session, driven end to end by compiling docs/examples/log-watcher and watching its diagnostic count fall (481 → 0). In order:

• let annotations, container literals, statics, pub(read) — let x: multi Text = [], map<K, V>, ?T; []/[a, b]/{} as expressions; static const/static fn with Cls.fn(...) calls; a ; ends a statement so one-line guard bodies parse.
• try/catch over the trap system (plan 8 Task 5) — VM catch frames (TRY/ENDTRY), unwind-to-handler with the try region's own values released, err_fill for the {code, line, method, msg} record, expression and block catch arms. Uncaught traps unchanged.
• nil + 23 text/container builtins — len, byte_at, print_err, starts_with/ends_with, index_of/last_index_of, substr, trim, to_lower, char_of, parse_int, split/split_ws, join, slice, pop/shift, sort, reverse, remove, key_at/val_at, multi_set.
• for k, v in m over a map, and m[i] = v for a multi.
• the systems stdlib's OS half (runtime/src/sysio.c) — fs, time, env, net, proc behind the reserved module names, with predeclared Stat, TimeParts and Proc records and the new WO_T_IO trap.
• json (runtime/src/json.c) + .wob v2 — per-field names, referenced classes and element kinds in the class table, so encode/decode are one metadata-driven implementation; json.decode(t) as T is the language's only cast, yielding ?T.
• program mode — fn main(args: multi Text) -> Int, argv delivered by the runtime, return value as the exit code.
• two safety fixes found by running it: + on Text was lowering to ADD on two heap pointers (now WO-E201 pointing at ..; seven sites in the sample were corrected), and x == nil was lowering to EQS, which dereferences the zero word (now EQ).

Gates at the end of that session: corpus 71/0, woc runtest 565/0, every wovm unit gate green in both dispatch flavors.

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Done

Language track — compiler + VM (OOP track)

Status	Item	Doc	What actually landed
✅	Principles	../00-principles.md	13 principles, each with a why and a link to the doc that enforces it
✅	wovm VM core	plan 1	.wob v1 loader with full static validation, register interpreter (computed-goto + ISO-C fallback), arena with size-class free lists, borrow word, RC + budgeted Bacon–Rajan cycle collector, drop-map trap unwinding, containers, builtins, ICALL, CLI. 13 suites × 2 dispatch flavors + CLI smoke, ASan/UBSan clean
✅	.wob format contract	oop-vm/00-wob-format.md	Normative; twinned with runtime/src/wob.h
✅	woc compiler front	plan 2	Tasks 1–8: dune scaffold, diag (WO-E codes, two-site related errors, ordered dedup), newline-significant lexer at rt parity, declaration + statement/expression parser with skip-on-block and multi-error recovery, typechecker (field kinds, ?T plumbing, W201, E225, E214), MVS ownership pass with the four emitter tables, driver with directory discovery + cross-file programs. 14 + 264 checks
✅	Error catalog	oop-vm/01-error-catalog.md	14 emitted codes + 10 reserved, each with the reason it is not yet emitted
✅	log-watcher .wo sample	../examples/log-watcher/	Eight-file port authored docs-first with its .hx mapping table; compiles for real in iteration 7
✅	Scalar cleanup	discarded.md	Money/SKU/Float and the abstract allowlist removed; abstract flipped adopt → reject
✅	woc emitter, corpus, single binary	plan 3	Tasks 1–6 + 8 (Task 7, a parity harness against the Rust runtime, deferred by explicit user decision — the two stacks diverge by design). Bytecode emitter (emit.ml) + disassembler (disasm.ml, --dump-bc); three-kind conformance harness (scripts/oop-e2e.sh, just oop-e2e) over tests/corpus/{run,compile-fail,trap,gc}; pricing-demo + ownership/trap corpora (19 fixtures); @gc cycle collector's post-exit pump (WO_GC_BUDGET/WO_GC_TRACE) + 2 gc fixtures (gc/held-cycle retired — see criterion-3 closure below); woc build single-binary output + relocation/corrupt-trailer smoke; WO-E405 closing criterion 3's ASan leak (entry must return Int); just oop-accept wiring all five spec criteria + both unit gates into one command. 14 + 399 compiler checks; oop-e2e 25/25 against the release wovm. Milestone-1 acceptance gate is fully green — all five criteria met (see the dated acceptance note in docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-01-oop-compiler-vm-design.md)

Known gaps carried out of iteration 3 — recorded, not silently owed:

• ?T is plumbed but unenforced. Lexer/token/AST/parser/dump all handle ?T; the semantics do not exist (WO-E211/E212/E213 declared, never emitted — a probe returning ?Int as Int exits 0). Owned by iteration 5, plan 8 Task 6, which is that iteration's first task because it blocks the log-watcher port. See compiler/nullable-types-implementation.md.
• Structural interface satisfaction is not checked (WO-E205 dead), along with type mismatch, bad arity, and unknown-fn (E201/E203/E204) — all named in plan 2 Task 6's own must-fail list. Gaps in shipped work, catalogued as reserved.
• Six further narrowings (W201 heuristic, E225 reach, dead code after return, unresolved-callee drops, RC table ordering, residual b-side role) are listed in the plan-2 SDD ledger and in the affected files' own comments.

Known gaps carried out of iteration 4 — recorded, not silently owed:

• WO-E205 (unsatisfied interface) reachable but unenforced — closed 2026-08-18 (branch type-enforcement): structural satisfaction is checked at call arguments, annotated lets, and returns; the pinned fixture moved to compile-fail/unsatisfied-interface with fixture.code WO-E205 in the same change, as its comment demanded. The hybrid boundary is restored.
• set(m, k, v)'s @gc retention gap on map keys/values is open — the twin of the push bug Task 5 fixed for multi. set has no equivalent special case in owner.ml's analyze_call, so a @gc key or value handed to set is under-counted and the collector can free it while the map still points at it. Nothing in the corpus exercises this yet. See oop-vm/08-builtin-surface.md.

Known gaps carried out of the 2026-08-14 compile-and-run milestone — recorded, not silently owed:

• Optionals are lenient. ?T has its representation (the zero word) and its comparisons, but WO-E211–E213 are still dead: a ?T may be used where T is required, and nothing narrows inside an if x != nil branch. The workload leans on that leniency today.
• pub(read) is parsed, not enforced. The marker rides on the field (Ast.field.pub_read); no check refuses a write from outside the declaring class yet.
• using extensions and #if build flags are absent, and the reject rows (extends/cast/Dynamic/…) still have no doctrine-citing diagnostics — plan 8 Tasks 7–8's remainder.
• A borrowed non-constant Text pushed into a container is a double-free hazard — closed 2026-08-14 by copy-on-push: push/set/m[i] = v copy a TEXT element, key or value into the container, and the compiler drops a freshly built Text right after the call (a value read out of a place keeps its owner). The failure it fixed was real: a tools/call of tail_log used to answer {"isError":true,"text":"tool failed: not a text value"}; all four MCP tools now return isError:false with correct payloads. OWNED/GCREF elements still move, and set's @gc retention gap is still open (see oop-vm/08-builtin-surface.md).
• A blocking accept/read swallows SIGTERM. env.stopping() installs a handler that only sets a flag, and net.accept/net.read retry on EINTR, so a server parked in accept never observes it: a plain TERM does not stop the process (timeout -k / kill -9 does). Graceful shutdown needs an interruptible wait — the shard-actor runtime's event loop (iteration 8) is where that belongs, not a patch to the blocking calls.
• A temporary record whose field is iterated is never dropped — for e in parse_dir(dir).entries keeps the entries alive (good) but leaks the ParseResult shell (its drop is recorded for no register). Found in the same disassembly; a leak, not a corruption.
• json's two documented limits — closed 2026-08-18 (branch json-fidelity): a Bool field encodes true/false (WOB_FIELD_BOOL / WOB_FIELD_NIL_BOOL in the field metadata), and a fraction/exponent is malformed for an Int field — the checked decode yields nil instead of truncating (floats stay representable via a raw json.Value field).
• net fd lifetime is the program's problem. net.close exists; the sample's MCP server never calls it, so a long-running mcp session leaks descriptors. That is the sample's bug to fix, not the runtime's.
• The workload has never run under ASan, and iteration 4's gc/held-cycle leak (above) is still open. The corpus itself stays ASan-clean.
• json.encode Bool/nil-scalar asymmetry — closed 2026-08-18 with the same change: Bool encodes true/false, ?Bool nil encodes null.
• No corpus fixtures cover the new surface. By explicit direction (2026-08-14) the acceptance for this work is the log-watcher program itself, not fixture pairs; tests/corpus/ still gates every pre-existing behavior (71 checks, 0 failures).
• E201/E203 and seven other WO-E2xx codes remain declared but unemitted — see oop-vm/01-error-catalog.md.
• CLOSED — milestone-1's ASan gate (just oop-accept) failing on gc/held-cycle. Root cause (Task 8's finding, restated): main.c's entry-method return value (uint64_t ret, src/main.c:158) is stored but never released, so gc/held-cycle's "permanent external hold" was actually a permanent refcount inflation — LeakSanitizer's "definite leak" (1184 bytes / 3 allocations) was correctly reporting exactly that, not a false positive. Fixing it by releasing ret was rejected: the .wob method table carries no return-type/kind metadata, so main.c has no way to know ret is a pointer rather than a scalar, and adding that metadata is a format change out of scope here. Fixed instead at the source: the systems-track spec already requires the entry to return Int (its return value is the process exit code), so a class-returning main was never legal — WO-E405 (compiler/src/emit.ml, 01-error-catalog.md) now rejects it at compile time, and gc/held-cycle is retired because its premise (an externally-held cycle survives a post-exit pump) is no longer expressible — see oop-vm/02-corpus.md's "Retired" note for why, and for where the scenario it meant to cover is actually proven (runtime/test/test_cycle.c, plus a proper in-flight fixture scheduled for story iteration 7b). Spec success criterion 3 is now MET; just oop-accept passes all five criteria.

The C proving-ground work (exploration/c-runtime/, phases A–F: 859k reads/s, 618k durable commits/s) fed the current C runtime and remains as an exploration study.

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Pending

Language track — sequenced, on the critical path

#	Item	Plan
5	Haxe-parity language surface — ?T forced handling first, then switch expressions, records, enum payloads, try/catch, statics, using, modules, is, pub(read), #if	plan 8
6	Program mode + systems stdlib — fn main, exit codes, fs/proc/net/time/json	plan 9
7	log-watcher proof — the sample compiles and detects a silent death live	plan 10
8	Shard-actor runtime	plan 4
9	Database engine binding	plan 5
9b	@table + relations + language-integrated query — comprehension queries, ref/backlink navigation, GroupBy aggregates; acceptance: new docs/examples/employee sample	spec · plan
9c	Cross-program tables — attach to a running program's database (IPC string in wo.toml, manifest-granted rights, owner stays the single writer)	no spec yet — four open forks recorded in the iteration; brainstorm before planning
9d	Keypair attach auth — mutual challenge–response, grants name public keys, uid superseded	no spec yet — four forks recorded; plan folds into 9c's
9e	Durability + throughput + scale — restart-persistence, read/write benchmark, ~1M rows; the gate every later optimization re-runs	no spec yet — four forks recorded; the measurement backbone
9f	io_uring group-commit write path — batched durability overlapped on shard threads, fsync fallback	no spec yet — brainstorm after iterations 8 + 9e
9g	Query grammar from real embedded-DB corpora — whole-query count + correlated exists, driven by the skillhost SQL catalogue; add only what a corpus uses	no spec yet — three forks; may collapse to "confirm len(query) + add exists"
14	skillhost host workload — port skillhost (MCP host + confined script runner) to writeonce; drives the missing host capabilities into the open (bounded subprocess, stdin/stdout transport, fs metadata, FFI-vs-out-of-process)	no spec yet — gaps recorded in the iteration; each gap brainstormed on demand, bounded-subprocess first
10	HTTP service layer	plan 6
11	Fibers	vision §3, blue-green exploration
12	Blue-green deploy	spec — plan authored after iterations 9–10

Language track — parked until after iteration 12

Recorded 2026-08-08 by scope directive; nothing here lands before the log-watcher proof.

• WO-W201 @gc-suggestion refinement beyond the self-reference heuristic
• WO-E225 broadened to ref/multi/map element types and fn signatures
• ADT container roster adoption (Stack, Queue, Set, Tree, Graph, …) — see the roster in compiler/nullable-types-implementation.md
• Web framework as a .wo library; UI (##ui SSR + live patches); script-based destructive migrations; MCP/agent wrapper over the management plane
• throw (explicit raise) — cut 2026-08-10, 0 uses in the driving workload (log-watcher); catch frames ship without it
• time.mono — cut 2026-08-10, 0 uses in the driving workload; returns when a workload needs monotonic math
• is — cut 2026-08-10, 0 uses in the driving workload; emptied plan 8's old Task 7, which is deleted rather than deferred

Frontend — removed as stale (2026-08-17)

The ##ui / .htmlx LiveView frontend track — 13d pricing UI, the 14-MVC-UI implementation plan, the 7-of-7 ui-htmlx-live plan, and the 9-doc plan/exploration/ui/ design set — was removed. It was built entirely on the non-advancing Rust runtime (.dev/reference/crates/wo-htmlx, cargo run, WebSocket live-patches) and contradicts the current woc/wovm direction. Recorded in discarded.md.

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Discarded

Settled rejections with their reasons live in discarded.md — inheritance, abstract newtypes, Money/SKU/Float, Dynamic/cast/ macro/extern, AOT-to-C, Menhir, shared mutable engine state, external deployer daemon, destructive migrations in v1, and more. Argue against the recorded reason rather than re-opening an entry as new.

Learnings

What attempts taught, shipped or not, in learnings.md — plumbed-is-not-enforced, vacuously-passing goldens, exit-0-with-wrong-output, the malloc-path ASan trick, deferred checks that never reach the runtime, validate-once-at-the-boundary, and reference-implement-in-C-first.